Terrorism

Politics of human blood in India

The Milli Gazette

Published Online: Nov 29, 2011

Print Issue: 1-15 December 2011

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Ilyas Azmi
Former Member of Parliament

After the terrorist attack in Mumbai in November 2008, Maharashtra’s chief minister and the then union home minister were sacked but the National Security Advisor on whom lay the main responsibility of security continued to hold his post because he must be in the know of some state secrets whose disclosure could have affected the continuation of the existing government.

When a high-ranking police, civilian or judicial officer makes some wrong moves for politicians in power while holding office or dances to their tune, political leadership also perforce has to take good care of him after his retirement because he can expose the misdeeds of these politicians if not obliged.

While writing about Babri Masjid I had written that Rajiv Gandhi had deputed a Supreme Court judge to Faizabad who had made the district judge Krishn Mohan Pande agree to the unlocking of the Babri Masjid. After retirement, that honourable judge works as the chairman of some commission or the other and is also enjoying the salary of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Therefore, if he holds a press conference and reveals why Rajiv Gandhi had deputed him to get the locks of the Babri Masjid opened, how would the Nehru dynasty solicit Muslim votes? Hence, they have to be paid for not disclosing their secrets and these payments are made from the government exchequer which is public money. In this way, bureaucrats, police and even judicial officers are made to do illegal and unfair assignments but fearing that after retirement these people may expose the misdeeds of politicians or ministers, they are suitably rewarded in some form or the other. In this way, corruption and evil practices go on multiplying.

In UP only a few months after Mayawati had come to power, ATS had picked up Hakim Tariq Qasmi of Azamgarh and Khalid Mujahid of Jaunpur from the vicinity of their residences and after about a week or ten days it showed their arrest from Barabanki alongwith RDX and some other dangerous weapons. In addition to this, a Kashmiri youth, who used to sell shawls, was killed near Chinhat (near Lucknow) and a map of the chief minister’s residence was “recovered” from him. The CM herself was so frightened that her movements and activities were confined to her residence and continue to be so until now.

In another similar incident, a Pakistani national called Noor Baksh, who was imprisoned in Lucknow jail, was made to get off the police van while being taken to court and later killed near the jail itself whereas some Indian MPs including myself were asked to carry on a campaign for securing the release of Sarabjeet Singh, an Indian spy who was arrested in Pakistan and sentenced to death (for executing a bomb blast there).

I, as a Bahujan Samaj Party MP, was very worried that if UP-STF’s high handedness was not reined in, BSP’s image will be greatly harmed. Meanwhile I happened to meet a high ranking police officer of UP for certain work. We knew each other since long. He asked me about the image of the new government (Mayawati’s) among the general public. I shot back and said that during Mulayam Singh Yadav’s regime you people killed about three dozen educated Muslim youths and spoilt the image of Mulayem Singh and now you are doing the same with our (BSP) government. I told him that Hakim Tariq Qasmi was kidnapped when his motorcycle was stopped on a busy road of Azamgarh of which there were many eyewitnesses. After about ten days the police showed his arrest from Barabanki alongwith arms. This is a case connected to my own place and I know Hakim Tariq personally. People who themselves had seen him being kidnapped told me about this.

Hearing this, he became serious and said that he has been holding important posts since Mulayam Singh’s times and today also with Bahenji’s grace he is in a still better position. He added that “truly speaking, we are all bound with a system which has been developed over the past many years and we are bonded labourers of this system.”

He said that I and you know each other for the past 15 years and here you are an important member of the ruling party and also one of the distinguished Members of our Parliament but even then if I get a message from the I.B. in Delhi to declare that some RDX was recovered from the MP’s residence, I will be bound to take you to your residence for search and if in our team there is any communal-minded officer or someone who has some grudge against you, it is not at all difficult for us to say that 100 or 50 grams of RDX was recovered from your residence. He said that it is true that youths were encountered on the pretext of terrorism but it was all because of orders from Delhi.

I asked him why after all, terrorists come to five states, i.e., Delhi, U.P., Gujarat, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh only where they failed to kill even a single policeman all these years but when they come to these states they get killed? Do they come to these five states when they want to get killed?

In Kashmir, where there is real terrorism, they attack military cantonments but even then more than two never go there together and they die after killing many times more armymen and police personnel than themselves. But they come to Delhi only to be killed. Why don’t they go to other states besides these five states? In states like Bihar, not a single encounter on the pretext of Lashkar-e Toiba etc. has taken place.

The police officer said that much depends on the thinking of the chief minister of the state. In Bihar neither any action was taken on IB’s information during Lalu’s times nor even now under Nitish Kumar. He said that now in UP also there will be no encounter in the name of terrorism. And thereafter no encounter has taken place in U.P. in the name of terrorism, though encounters are taking place daily in the name of criminals and the numbers of Muslims are very large in these encounters, but this is because of the mentality of the local police.

Obviously, a government officer can talk on such sensitive subjects upto a certain point. Now it is certain that in Mulayam Singh’s period, on the basis of information received from IB that such and such person is LeT’s terrorist, UP police used to kidnap him like Tariq Qasmi and after a few days he was killed and a concocted story was registered on GD and issued to the press. Same things were being got done by Modi in Gujarat but when Modi changed his attitude, terrorists stopped going to Gujarat. Since Delhi police is directly under the control of the central government, its record is worst.

As long as the Shiv Sena-BJP government was in Maharashtra, terrorists were not going there but ever since a Congress government is in power, terrorists regularly come here to die. For some police officers the term “encounter specialists” started from there. For some time terrorists had a desire to be killed in Andhra Pradesh too. As long as Telugu Desam government was there, Andhra Pradesh did not exist on the terrorists’ map of India but as soon as a Congress government came to power there, terrorists started reaching there to be killed. It is another matter that before his own death, Raj Shekhar Reddy’s eyes opened and he sternly said that no terrorist will now come to Andhra. He set free all “terrorists” who had been in jails as a result of IB’s identification and gave them some compensations too and he also apologised to the Muslims. As long as Narendra Modi got youths of Gujarat and other states picked up and killed in bulk at the identification of IB on the pretext of being terrorists, they used to go every month to Gujarat for being killed but when he decided not to encounter them despite the identification by IB, terrorists stopped going there. Now neither any encounter is taking place in Gujarat nor will there be any while Modi rules.

Now the central government and its beloved agency’s thirst for blood can be extinguished only in Delhi and Maharashtra. UP, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh are now out of their bound till the writing of this report.

On the court’s order, investigation of Sohrabuddin encounter in Gujarat was done by the special team of Gujarat itself, which proves that there was no truth in Sohrabuddin’s alleged relationship with LeT and yet he was picked up by the police and killed. DIG Vanjara and about a dozen police officers are even now in jail. Ishrat Jahan was a resident of Mumbara (Maharashtra). She and three other educated Muslim youths were picked up with the help of Maharashtra police and got killed on a lonely road of Ahmedbad at night after they were forced to get down from a police vehicle. Next day, newspapers published the good news for the whole country that four hardcore terrorists of LeT were killed in a police encounter. The whole country was told that these dangerous terrorists had come to kill Narendra Modi. Ishrat Jahan’s mother knocked at the door of the court which ordered a magisterial enquiry. The magistrate conducted the enquiry and said in his report that Ishrat Jahan and the three youths who were killed alongwith her neither had any connection with LeT nor were they making any plans to kill Modi. They were simply picked up and got killed.

On this report Congressmen were highly elated. They issued many statements against Narendra Modi and indulged in political rhetoric to fool my politically stupid community. Central government also filed a good affidavit in the court. When a fascist like Modi also lost his patience, he said in a statement that Gujarat police had no idea that an Ishrat Jahan lives in Mumbra of Maharashtra and it was the central government and IB which had informed Gujarat police that Ishrat Jahan and her such and such colleagues are “hardcore” terrorists of LeT who are hatching a conspiracy to kill the chief minister. Modi also said in his statement that it was the central government which had informed the Gujarat government about Sohrabuddin and others that they were LeT men and were hatching a conspiracy to kill the chief minister. This means that all the murders of Muslim youths that had taken place in Gujarat in the name of encounter were no doubt executed by Gujarat government/police but it was in fact the central government at whose behest all these murders were committed by Gujarat government/police. Central government felt very uneasy at these disclosures by Narendra Modi. Union home minister could not say that Modi is telling lies but said in defence that if IB had furnished this information, it had not given a licence to kill them. Thus, P. Chidambaram indirectly admitted that whatever encounters of Muslim youths have taken place in Gujarat, all were on the basis of identifications and information supplied by the central government. (Translated from Urdu)

This article appeared in The Milli Gazette print issue of 1-15 December 2011 on page no. 11

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